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What’s good, y’all?
Gangs are all over the news right now, even though we don’t have an agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes a gang. The U.S. Justice Department’s National Gang Center has a general idea of who might qualify: It’s a group with three or more members; its members are between the ages of 12 and 24; they share an identity or name; and the group is involved in an elevated level of criminal activity. While the federal government considers groups like MS-13, the Crips or the Latin Kings are "gangs", a group like the Proud Boys — whose members do a lot of gang-y stuff like throw up signs and sell drugs and guns — don’t tend to be labeled the same way. It’s all giving I-know-it-when-we-see-it vibes.
And right now, the White House certainly “sees” it. Last month, the Trump Administration sent three flights to El Salvador in an effort to remove people suspected of being in the U.S. without legal status, including those who are allegedly gang members. But the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a reminder of just how murky the “gang” label is. Abrego Garcia is a Maryland man at the center of what some are saying is becoming a constitutional crisis, after he was mistakenly removed from the country (according to the government’s own admission) and sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison. The federal judge overseeing the case, Judge Paula Xinis said this week that “nothing has been done, nothing” to comply with the Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the U.S. Despite a lack of evidence, the Trump administration maintains that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang MS-13, which has ties to El Salvador; the administration has defined it as a foreign terrorist organization. But how could Abrego Garcia, or anyone for that matter, even prove a lack of gang membership? |
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Being accused of being in a gang, or even just having “gang ties,” has continued to be a huge concern in the American criminal legal system. Police departments around the country have been keeping track of gang members — or trying to — for decades throughso-called "gang databases." The way these different police agencies decide if someone belongs on these lists is opaque and differs from place to place. Critics of these rolls point to a few consistent patterns in their implementation: young, Black and Latino males are way more likely to end up on these lists, and once someone finds themselves on these rolls, it’s really hard to get off.
One study found that at one point in the 1990s, nearly half of the young Black men in Los Angeles County were listed as gang members, even though many had no record of arrests; the number was two out of three Black men in Denver’s gang database from around the same time. And the collected data was often rife with huge errors — an independent audit in 2015 of the state of California’s gang database, called CalGang, found that there were dozens of people listed as gang members by the police who would have been less than one year old at the time their information was entered. (In 2020, the Los Angeles Police Department found itself embroiled in scandal after it was discovered that officers were falsifying records in order to add people to CalGang.) And in recent years, these same databases have come to play a larger role in immigration enforcement.
Being on these lists can have enormous consequences for people who are arrested. In many jurisdictions, criminal charges come with “gang enhancements,” meaning that convictions come with harsher sentences than they would for people charged with crimes but not deemed to be gang members. And since Black and Latino men are orders of magnitude more likely to end up on these databases in the first place, you end up with a legal process in which Black and Latino defendants are often facing much stiffer penalties than white defendants accused of the same crimes in those jurisdictions. That’s why gang databases have been a consistent source of concern for civil rights groups.
And I think it’s worth underlining an obvious-but-weirdly-ignored point: while gang members often commit crimes, the simple fact of being in a gang, in and of itself, does not constitute a crime. But both in criminal procedure in the U.S. and the cases of people being removed from the country, the mere accusation of being in a gang is often doing most of the heavy-lifting in how people see the accused. Now that supposed affiliation with some gangs also carries with it the label of “terrorist,” the burden of proof is low but the stakes are high — potentially a matter of life and death.
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Newsletter continues after sponsor message
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| As the Trump administration targets the Smithsonian Institute for "divisive narratives" and "improper ideology," it got us thinking about how we preserve history and everything that builds it — like language. This week, we're revisiting an episode from the Lakota Nation in South Dakota over language — who preserves it, who has the right to the stories told in it, and who (literally) owns it. This episode, by our producer Christina Cala, recently won a prestigious Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media. |
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It seems half our team has been thoroughly beguiled by Dying for Sex, the new FX series starring Michelle Williams about a woman who receives some earth-shattering news, and then realizes that she has no effs left to give. It’s a sex-positive show — like, really, remarkably un-judgy or coy about sex — but it’s not just about getting off. It’s also about all of the labor and paperwork and grief that goes into end-of-life care. I’mma keep it a bean: I don’t really know what the Code Switch angle is in the show (besides that it was based on a podcast); it’s just a good show that’s worth your time.
Stay safe, y’all. |
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Written by Gene Demby and edited by Courtney Stein
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